Our Waters, Our Selves: A Conversation with Astrida Neimanis

Water flows through us all. This is something we all know, and yet it is a fact we often take for granted. The water that sustained my ancestors, both human and nonhuman, is the same water that flows out of my taps every morning. Every drop I drink is suffused with its own stories, connections, and meanings that then intersect with my own stories and my own body.

Yet in late capitalism, these flows also bring our bodies into contact PCBs, microplastics, antidepressants, and wayward estrogen. The byproducts of industrial processes in the U.S. can be found in the breast milk of Inuit mothers; the waste of rampant consumerism can be seen in the bloated stomachs of sea turtles and whales.

In this podcast, Astrida Neimanis discusses her latest book, Bodies of Water, and helps us make sense out of our contradictory relationship with water and how water continues to connect and act upon us all, although often in very different ways. Neimanis’ Bodies of Water challenges us to consider how seeing ourselves and others as bodies of water can change our ideas of embodiment and reframe our ethical obligation to all beings affected by rapid environmental degradation and change. She draws on the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Maurice Marleau-Ponty, as well as writers and artists like Jeannette Armstrong, Rebecca Belmore, Italo Calvino, Adrienne Rich, among many others, in a project devoted to acknowledging how important feminist, queer, and anticolonial theorists are to contemporary environmental thought. In this expansive and generous book, Neimanis calls us to examine how we relate to and manage water and other watery beings in light of the inequitable and deeply meaningful histories water carries.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Elena Height: What is your personal connection to water, and why did you choose to center your book around water?

Astrida Neimanis: So, in addition to the fact that I’m approximately 80 percent made up of it? It’s a good question, and I think I would answer it differently now than I might have when I started doing this research. When I started thinking seriously about water, over a decade ago, I was doing my Ph.D. at York University in Toronto and my field was feminist philosophy of embodiment. I was thinking in a materialist way about embodiments and if you’re going to think about the interconnectedness—from a feminist perspective—of bodies with other bodies, it doesn’t take long for you to start thinking that that interconnection is not only with human bodies.

My initial plan was that I would look at how the human body is made up of air, food, soil, water. But, luckily, I started with water and I never left. There was more than enough right there. It was an accidental environmentalism. In my personal life, I often had environmental interests. But as a scholar, it was feminist theory that led me to think environmentally in a really direct way. And then that opened up a whole different way for me to think about environmental concerns and issues in the world, starting from our own personal embodiment.

EH: In your book, Bodies of Water, you weave together so many diverse bodies of thought. I thought it was beautifully done. Could you give us an overview of what your book is about, and those bodies of thought, and why you chose to engage with them?

AN: Although water is something we are so intimate with, it’s also very elusive. It’s hard to pin down, quite literally. I realized that I had to rely on all sorts of different kinds of knowledge, not only a direct, embodied, sensory knowledge but also other kinds of stories or histories or sciences to find out what water is and what it means in the world.

I adopted this perspective whereby all of these things—whether it’s a fantastical story or a Darwinian story or scientific fact—all of these things become embodied, sensory ways of knowing the world, even if they’re at a slight remove. Whoever wrote that or thought that or explored that began from the question: how are we in the world?

By writing this book I hoped to explore the ways that how we know the world directly relates to how we act in the world. So, how we know water, and what we think water is, directly influences how we treat water. If we think of water as a commodifiable resource, if we think of water as something out there, if we think of water scarcity or water contamination as something that happens to certain communities, this will affect the way we treat water in our quotidian, everyday existences. Water isn’t something out there, it’s us. How we treat it is how we’re treating ourselves, our kin, our more-than-human kin. And in that sense, it becomes an environmental issue but from a very different starting point.

EH: One great example of that is your discussion of toxic breast milk. For me, that was one of the most powerful things, how we are so connected to these flows and the ethical implications of that connection.

AN: So, this is a great example, and it’s not my example. It’s something that I’ve taken from other researchers and scholars. I think I first learned about contaminated breastmilk from an article by Florence Williams, a journalist who wrote about the chemical contamination that she discovered in her own breast milk. One of the startling things about that article is the whole question of biomagnification. For a woman whose bodily waters have contaminants in them, because of the way breast milk works it concentrates those contaminants and then downloads them into an infant in a magnified way. Startling fact. Wow. My bodily waters then are connected to infants or other human bodies.

Now, if we take a more expansive view of that question, learning from scholars who research Inuit and Innu communities in the Arctic, we learn that breast milk in the Arctic region is far more contaminated than breast milk in the so-called industrialized Western world. Why is that? Well, through different kinds of connections between bodies of water, not breast to infant but factory to river to acid rain to wind and precipitation to ocean currents. These contaminants are carried by different kinds of bodies of water to the Arctic where they biomagnify up the food chain. So, in a thumb-sized piece of muktuk a person could consume more PCBs than are advisable in a year.

This is a kind of environmental colonialism, whereby breast feeders in the Arctic have a far greater body burden even though they themselves will not have been responsible for the pollution that has caused that body burden. It’s traveling through planetary bodies of water and then being transmitted through human bodies of water into infants.

For me, this brings everything together. Bodies of water are conduits, but not only of waters that are life-giving like breastmilk should be, but conduits of capitalism, colonialism, toxins, life-changing and life-altering substances. This implicates not only human bodies but more-than-human bodies, like the plankton that are eaten by the fish that are eaten by the seals that are eaten by the humans. These nonhuman animal bodies are also implicated in this toxic transit, a multispecies environmental colonialism that shows in a very disturbing way how we are all bodies of water and, as bodies of water, we are all connected but we don’t all experience this connection in the same way.

The question of body burden here then becomes very salient, not only in the environmental justice language of it. What kind of burden is that, when you want to breastfeed your child but you realize that more healthy to them would be to feed them formula? A burden there takes on not only scientific valence, but a very emotional and affective valence as well.

EH: In Bodies of Water you discuss Anthropocene water, and how we manage and think about water in the Anthropocene. Could you talk about the challenges that bodies of water specifically pose to Anthropocene water?

AN: So, again, my thinking on this is really influenced by others. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what Anthropocene water might mean by spending time with the artworks of Anishinabe artist Rebecca Belmore. Her works like “Fountain” and “Temple” both pose very different relationships to water. “Fountain,” I think, is an indictment of my embodied accountability as a settler on stolen land and stolen waters, asking me to think about water as blood. It’s a beautiful, very challenging, important video work. “Temple,” where she has these little baggies of water stacked up on this plinth, presents a managerial, commodified, itemized understanding of water as something that is exchangeable and can be contained and traded.

That second artwork got me thinking, what is Anthropocene water? This comes also out of an important book by geographer Jamie Linton, What is Water?, where Linton tracks the history of modern water: how it became this thing that was no longer waters, in the plural, but this substance that is exchangeable, quantifiable, and manageable. So, although Anthropocene water can be many different things, one thing that I think it is, is manageable.

What we try to do as part of the Anthropocene is, we try to come to grips with the massive angst and trauma we feel in the face of the devastation of the earth by trying to manage it. It’s this double-edged blade. By managing it, we try to get control over it and feel a little less untethered and lost at sea. But managing it compounds the problem. We can’t contain water. We can’t control it. It is unruly. We have to give ourselves over to what it wants to be, which is many, many different things and not just managed by humans.

We can learn from water that management and control are important in certain circumstances. We have so many problems of contamination or scarcity that will benefit from a bit of policy, or redistribution, or cleaning up. But if we overdo it on the control and management side, we’re going to lose touch with the way our bodies are attuned to water and its strange and queer rhythms and temporality and all the things it gathers and all the histories that are carried in it. Management and control can’t track those things. We have to give ourselves over to other kinds of knowledges and stories and experiences. And I think that is what it’s going to take to get on with things in the Anthropocene with any kind of grace.

EH: We’ve already touched on some of the ethical implications of thinking more expansively, but what are your thoughts about what could we do better as activists and scholars, going forward, to really think about the ways in which we deal with water and the environment? 

AN: Well, of course, that’s a question with many answers, right? We need to do everything. All hands on deck. Let’s pull out all the stops. A more modest way to answer your question, then, is what do I think my work might contribute to that? I mean, come on. I’m a scholar who is kind of a philosopher and a cultural thinker—I’m not going to save the world. But what my work might be able to contribute is to constantly insist that we attune ourselves to our relationship to water. To not imagine it is something out there or different or abstract from us, or the backdrop to our lives. Bring it into the foreground. How do we feel, think, relate to it? How do we treat it?

Another thing that I hope my work contributes to is insisting that water is not only an environmental question. As a feminist scholar and as someone whose background is in gender studies, it’s very important for me to always look at the intersections between environmental degradation and misogyny, anti-blackness, settler colonialism, ageism, ableism. All of these questions, because of the siloing of academic disciplines, have been traditionally treated as human cultural questions.

But when we start to look at everything from environmental justice to even environmental science, we start to see that it’s impossible to separate those cultural questions from the environmental ones. So, thinking more about all of the amazing work done by feminist and queer and Indigenous and crip scholars have done: how can all of those be brought to thinking about our relationship to water and other environmental questions? That’s happening in amazing ways ,and I’m learning from those scholars all the time, but we should focus on that. Water is not abstract, and water is not experienced by abstract humans. It’s experienced, whether in good or bad ways, by humans whose lives are situated by all of those things.

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Featured image: The homewaters of Astrida Neimanis, Windermere Basin, Hamilton, Ontario. Photo by Krusa Neimligers, 2018.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Astrida Neimanis writes mostly about water and weather from intersectional feminist perspectives. Her books include Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017) and the co-edited collection Thinking with Water (2013). She was grown up by the Great Lakes of Turtle Island in Hamilton, Ontario, but is currently Senior Lecturer of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Gadigal Country, Australia. Website. Twitter. Contact.

Elena Hight is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current research explores the politics and policies behind water infrastructures in cities along the Great Lakes. Before graduate school, she worked as an educator in Honduras and a bookstore manager in Oklahoma. During this time, she worked extensively with local environmental advocacy groups, work that she continues to do today. She is also a member of InterACT Youth, an intersex activist group. With InterACT, she has given numerous presentations to both community and university organizations on intersex human rights violations and has written about her experience as an intersex person. Her work has been published in Sociological Imagination, Mic, NukeWatch, and Rooted in Care: Sustaining Movements. Contact.